TechSummit Berlin - April 13th, 2016

Designing for Scalability

Join us for an enjoyable day of tech insights

Don’t miss this chance to hear expert speakers share tips, tricks and ideas on a wide range of tech topics. Join others from the tech community in a day of informal chat and information exchange – all in the really cool surroundings of Berlin's Kulturbrauerei. It’s a great day out and only €25 for a full day pass (including food!). Order your tickets here and now.

Some of the topics our speakers will cover this year are:

Scalability

Deploying apps at massive scale

Load balancing and Load Testing

How to build a awesome Site Reliability team

Secret management

Schedule (April 13th)

09h00 - 10h00

Registration and Coffee

10h00 - 10h10

Opening notes

10h10 - 10h55

Joshua Hoffman, Manager Product Engineering @ LeaseWeb

A security focused system administrator and technical instructor, Joshua Hoffman has trained Ops staff from the West Coast to the far east in practical, efficient, and effective system management and automation. Hoffman created major portions of Red Hat’s acclaimed System Administration training program and certification exams. Prior to joining LeaseWeb, Hoffman was director of infrastructure at SoundCloud and Tumblr.

The seven deadly sins of web scale

Rapid development tools and frameworks make it easier than ever to create new Apps. However, creating an app that works at web scale continues to be a challenge. Drawing on years of experience working at Red Hat, Tumblr, and SoundCloud, Joshua Hoffman will reveal the secrets to web scale and discuss the patterns and pitfalls to avoid using real examples and case studies.

10h55 - 11h45

Matthias Rampke, Engineer @ SoundCloud

I joined SoundCloud in 2011 to help with internal IT. As part of the Systems and Production Engineering teams, I have been operating, debugging and restarting the glue that holds SoundCloud together since 2013.

Load balancing at SoundCloud: A practical history

As SoundCloud’s application and deployment architectures have evolved, so have the technologies we use to get requests and connections to where they need to be. Today, they support 175 million monthly active listeners and hundreds of thousands of requests per second – and are still built on readily available, open source components.
This talk gives an overview of the techniques we use now and the background that they grew out of. It is not a comprehensive overview of all possible ways to do load balancing, but rather focuses on what works for us and how the pieces complement and complete each other.
We will take a closer look at IPVS for Layer 4 connection load balancing, HAProxy for Layer 7 HTTP loadbalancing, with honorable mentions for ECMP and our service discovery mechanism. For each, we will see which use cases they excel in, when and how they break down, and what to watch out for so this doesn't catch you by surprise.

11h45 - 13h00

Lunch

13h00 - 13h30

Bernhard Frank, Partner Technology Strategist @ Microsoft

Bernhard Frank is Partner Technology Strategist at the Microsoft Germany Hosting division. He wants to see more and more Service Providers use Microsoft Software to be run and offered in the cloud. He likes Windows Server and PowerShell. You can reach him on his blog:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/bernhard_frank/

Nano Server – Windows Server vNext built for the Cloud

Operating large-scale server farms is shaping products we build at Microsoft.
For the datacenter people want operating systems that are easy to maintain whilst being very efficient.
With the release of Windows Server 2016 there will be the "Nano Server". An installation option of the server that should meet these requirements.
Let's see how this new server will look like (as technical preview) what it can do and which problems it should solve.

13h30 - 14h00

Arnoud Vermeer, Innovation Engineer @ LeaseWeb

Arnoud Vermeer has worked at web-scale startups Square and Tumblr. He recently joined LeaseWeb to help the CDN team automate their infrastructure, so that they can scale faster to sustain their growth rate.

Scaling our engineering department

At LeaseWeb we started a transition towards a more agile and empowered engineering culture. This talk is a summary of things we did, what impact they had and lessons learned.

14h00 - 14h30

Arjun Naik, Site Reliability @ Zalando

Arjun Naik works at Zalando in the Site Reliability Engineering Team, helping teams build more reliable and performant applications. He received an MSc degree in Distributed Systems Engineering
from Technische Universität Dresden. He is interested in all things Python and Distributed.

Load Testing in the Microservices World

At Zalando, we have adopted a new approach to software delivery called Radical Agility. The former Zalando “Shop” was largely a monolith located in a Datacenter. The adoption of Radical Agility moved teams to a microservices architecture, and made them autonomous and responsible for the end-to-end delivery of their microservices. Shop teams have since been rewriting their services to be deployed in the cloud, and because these microservices are not battle-tested or organically grown like their DC counterparts, the Site Reliability Engineering team at Zalando has provided stress testing for these new services. To load test the microservices we evolved a procedure which minimised the impact of load testing on related teams and services. Locust was chosen as the tool to perform the tests. We also had to understand the architecture of the microservice so that we could design the test to successfully stress the application by avoiding any caches which would skew the results.

14h30 - 14h45

Coffee Break

14h45 - 15h30

Jorge Salamero Sanz, Chief Developer Evangelist @ ServerDensity

Jorge co-founded Zentyal, a successful open source Exchange protocol interoperability company. He now drives Server Density evangelism, showing potential customers and community members best practices
adopting DevOps practices and monitoring their infrastructure. When he's not writing monitoring plugins he's enjoying walks with his 2 dogs across the countryside.

War Games - flight training for DevOps

Here @ Server Density we monitor 100.000+ servers processing 2B metrics a day. We deliver a service that needs to continuously monitor our customer's infrastructure, that's why downtime is critical for us and we keep training to react to incidents.
We organize our internal War Games where all engineers practice the processes involved in incident handling.
We have seen how this improves the associated human factors, our processes and our tools.

As a security-focused software engineer, Alex Schoof has been designing and building systems ranging from GPU-accelerated network analytics to crypto-hardware-as-a-service offerings for large enterprises, startups, and everything in between. He is currently a principal engineer at Fugue, where he works on distributed coordination systems and secure execution environments.

Managing secrets at scale

Secrets come in many shapes and sizes: database API keys, database passwords, private keys. Distributing and managing these secrets is usually an afterthought. It's hard to get right, and can be very expensive if you get it wrong. In this session, we'll look at the core operations and properties that make up a good secret management system, and how these principals can be implemented.

16h15 - 16h30

Coffee Break

16h30 - 17h15

Adam Surak, DevOps Engineer @ Algolia

Adam is a DevOps Engineer at Algolia. Formerly a network research engineer at Tampere University of Technology now dealing with scaling and reliability of infrastructure at Algolia.

Own your reliability

Who do you trust? What do you control? What are your dependencies? Reliability in the Internet is an adrenaline adventure but we all want a good night sleep and working service. Let’s take a closer look at some of the reliability nightmares and how they could be dealt with.

17h15 - 18h30

Closing notes and drinks

Venue

Kulturbrauerei, Berlin

The KulturBrauerei is a former landmark of industrialization with a distinctive architecture from the end of the 19th century – located in the heart of Berlin. The site which is under national trust protection contains six linked courtyards and over 20 buildings used by creative artists for a wide range of events including cultural happenings like parties, theatrical performances or cinematic and gastronomic events.